


Meddling Kids

by sibley (ferns)



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, CC High Paranormal Club, Child Death, Child Murder, Demons, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Paranormal Investigators, Past Character Death, nobody dies but there are dead people yk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 14:56:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15910557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: “And just like Wells and Morgan, the triple murder of Henry, Nora, and Bartholomew Allen was never solved. The murderer never struck again, but there are rumors that the people who worked to disassemble the, uh, necessary parts of the lab, saw and experienced things that they couldn’t explain.” Admittedly, this was the part Iris was a little bit less sure on. “Strange lights, and a woman’s voice, and a man telling people to run and not come back. Some visitors claim they saw a boy running down the hall, opening and closing doors and shouting for his parents, only for him to disappear when they went after him. Today, we’re here to fight out if there’s any truth behind these seemingly outlandish claims.”





	Meddling Kids

**Author's Note:**

> I watched one episode of Ghost Adventures. _One._ Content warnings for death, including child death, corpse/ghost descriptions (reasons for the GDV tag, I'm not sure if it fits but... Just in case?), teen/child endangerment, several large spiders, and one brief implication of underage drinking. As always, let me know if there's anything I should add.

“This is the place?” Cisco squints down at the photograph and then looks up at the hulking building in front of them. He was the first out of their little group, in retrospect perhaps a little bit too eager to see the supposedly haunted site. “I guess it just seems… Um… Bigger, in person. That’s all.”

“Yeah, duh. It was the biggest back in the day, right?” Iris rolls her eyes as she jumps out of the passenger seat of the car, banging her hands loudly on the white top and startling Ralph so bad he jumps and smashes his head into the roof of the car as he tries to get out. “Before it got shut down, and all.”

“Move your ass, Dibny.” Cindy pushes Ralph the rest of the way out of the car. “I’m  _ not  _ staying back there on the way back. No matter what happens in here, that’s the truth. Even if I  _ die,  _ you’re not going to put me in the back. And Ralph can't pick the music. Is that understood?”

“Nobody is going to die,” Sue dismisses, turning the car all the way off. She’s  _ technically  _ not the only one of them who can drive, and it’s actually Cisco’s car, not hers, but they’ve basically relegated her to permanent friendship group chauffeur at this point because she’s the only one they trust not to back out at the last minute and take them somewhere that isn’t pants-shittingly scary. “None of us have died before.”

“There’s a first time for everything.” Cindy peers up at the building. It  _ does  _ look more than a little frightening. “I thought it’d be cleaner. Wasn’t this place supposed to be kept up? Iris, didn’t you say there were janitors here during the day?”

“They’re not gonna clean the outside. And there are tons of gaps in the security cameras.” Iris beams, shoving her hands deep into her pockets so that they won’t see her fingers shaking with a mix of anxiety and excitement. “Cisco, you’ve got the cameras that  _ won’t  _ expose us to the police?”

“Locked and loaded, chief.” Cisco salutes her, passing Sue and Ralph their respective cameras, clutching his own (helpfully labeled ‘Cindy 2’ with a little piece of tape and some black marker). “Cindy, you’ve got the recording stuff?”

She rolls her eyes a little bit and holds it up. They’re all dressed in black (“For stealth!”), but it was mostly sweaters, sweatshirts, and dark jeans. Cindy is the only one wearing the same black leather as always, usual fingerless gloves replaced with ones that mask her fingerprints. Just in place. Her dad used to be a police officer, she knows how to commit a crime. Sort of. Enough that it counts! “Got it.”

“Sweet. Everybody got their flashlights, and does everyone remember the excuse in case we get caught in there by anybody alive?” Iris bounces up and down on the balls of her feet a little impatiently. She’s been planning  _ this  _ one for months now, down to the last detail. She even convinced Cisco to help her get the floor plans, so they wouldn’t be hopelessly lost once they were finally inside.

The other four all nod affirmatively, equally impatient in their own rights. Sue is rolling her flashlight back and forth between her palms, camera hanging around her neck, Ralph’s flicking the fingers on his right hand fast close to his chest, Cisco is humming what sounded like the  _ X-Files  _ theme under his breath, and Cindy is almost silently shifting from foot to foot. 

Iris really couldn’t ask for better friends. She grins a little wickedly. “And I’m ready to call Caitlin in case one of us falls down a big hole again. Follow me. Last time I was here, I found a hole in the fence that’s big enough for all of us to fit through, even Ralph.”

Once they’re all within the fence, it feels like they’ve just crossed into a whole different world. Suddenly, the sounds of the city seem farther away. More muffled than they were before, more than they have any right to be, this close to the bustling streets. Central City has a nightlife, after all, even if they don’t make it their business to participate. Iris tries not to seem bothered by it. Sue’s their voice of reason, but she’s the heart, the moral center, the one who’s leading this little group. She’s Iris West. She’s not  _ scared. _

As soon as they’re through the doors of the building, which Cindy picks the locks on (for a high tech building, it’s surprisingly easy to break into), they turn on their respective flashlights and cameras. Usually at this point Ralph would be trying to goof off, and Cindy would be letting Cisco hug onto her for ‘warmth’ and totally  _ not  _ out of anxiety, but nobody says anything as they make their way through the winding corridors.

“Iris,” Cisco reminds, hovering his thumb over the button that’ll start the recording with one hand and tapping her on the shoulder with the other, which Iris totally does  _ not  _ jump three inches in the air at, “it’s your turn to do the voiceover, remember?”

“Oh, yeah-start it now, ‘kay?” Iris clears her throat as Cisco pans the camera over the walls, careful not to linger on anybody’s faces. He’ll edit them to be censored later, so it doesn’t  _ really  _ matter, but it makes them less jittery when he doesn’t film them for long periods of time. Especially Sue. “You rolling?”

“Started,” he answers in a low voice, shooting her a thumbs up. It casts a strange shadow on the wall through the beam of Ralph’s flashlight, which he waves around and giggles a little bit as it makes new and different shapes. It falls flat. Even flatter than usual. “Go ahead.”

“STAR Labs-that’s Scientific and Technological Advanced Research Laboratories-temporarily closed its doors twenty years ago when two of its founders, Tess Morgan and Harrison Wells, were found brutally murdered in their own home, a crime that remains unsolved to this day,” Iris says in a low voice as Cisco films the hallway they’re walking down. “Only five years later, it shut down for good when three bodies were found inside the building, mutilated just like Morgan and Wells had been, with no explanation of how they got inside or their connection to the laboratory itself.”

_ Now  _ Cisco shudders and draws Cindy closer, even as he’s careful not to let the camera jostle too much. She pets his hair soothingly. Cisco’s more their tech guy than anything else-he’s brave when he comes down to it, and they’d be utterly lost without him, but that doesn’t mean he’s all that good at the actual investigating part. If they counted the time that he fell into a hole (even though a ghost  _ totally  _ pushed him!), it would be five times, instead of Ralph’s solo four.

“And just like Wells and Morgan, the triple murder of Henry, Nora, and Bartholomew Allen was never solved. The murderer never struck again, but there are rumors that the people who worked to disassemble the, uh, necessary parts of the lab, saw and experienced things that they couldn’t explain.” Admittedly, this was the part Iris was a little bit less sure on. “Strange lights, and a woman’s voice, and a man telling people to run and not come back. Some visitors claim they saw a boy running down the hall, opening and closing doors and shouting for his parents, only for him to disappear when they went after him. Today, we’re here to fight out if there’s any truth behind these seemingly outlandish claims.”

Cindy is the one to give her a thumbs up this time, and Iris nods a little shakily as she sweeps her own flashlight up over the ceiling and down into the inky blackness ahead of them. Cisco stops recording, smiling at her in a way that seems just a little bit too strained as Sue takes some pictures of a particularly large and interesting-looking spider she’s just found on Ralph’s back. “Iris,” she says quietly, because it feels like this is the kind of place where you shouldn’t be too loud, “you’re the one who knows where we’re going. Should we turn left up here at this hallway?”

“Yeah,” Iris loudly whispers back. She sets her hand on the wall and traces it until they get to the doorway. Every time she turns and shines her flashlight somewhere, it seems like it’s going to dance over someone’s abandoned skeleton. “Follow me, apparently the floor is kind of rotted away, and I  _ really  _ don’t want to be the one to have to tell Caitlin that Ralph fell down another hole and we can’t get him back out on our own.”

“It was only four times!” Ralph protests, letting Sue get the spider she was admiring earlier off his jacket. Along with its suddenly appearing children. Apparently, spiders like this one carried their babies, which Sue hadn’t known before she started to swat at it. “That’s not even  _ that  _ many!”

“Yes, it is.” Sue finishes getting the spiders off and kisses his ear on her way past, clicking her flashlight a few times down into said gaping holes in the floor. The darkness beneath them is so thick the beam can’t penetrate it. “Aren’t these floors supposed to be metal, or plastic, or glass, or something? That doesn’t rot like this, only wood does.”

“...Huh.” Cisco looks down too and frowns. He tests the next few steps before stomping down on the edge of one of the holes and watching it break off easily and fall down into the blackness. “Hey, yeah. You’re right. That’s really weird. It even feels and looks kind of like spongy wood, too, doesn’t it? Maybe it actually is wood, and they just lied about it. A cost cutting thing, or something. Right?”

Which is, of course, when something grabs Cindy’s wrist.

Later on she knows she’ll deny how loudly she screamed, but when she does, it’s loud enough that they all take off running, throwing themselves over the last gaps in the floor and huddling up against the wall on the other side. Iris almost throws up out of sheer anxiety, gripping onto Cisco’s hand while he clings to Cindy, whose frantically patting herself down as she brushes and rubs at invisible fingers.

“Something tried to get me in there,” she pants out, whites of her eyes flashing as she looks around at nothing in particular. “Something tried to-it tried to grab me, I  _ felt it  _ grab me, I don’t know-I don’t know-Christ, I swear something was holding onto my arm. I felt it right there-” She runs her fingers over the spot again nervously. “Shit, I-that wasn’t any of you guys?”

Her tone is just a little bit too dangerous for any of them to feel comfortable taking one for the team and lying and saying that they were the one who touched her wrist. Maybe if she didn’t sound so frightened, or if she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would push one of them into the holes they’d just been trying so hard to avoid if they pretended to own up to it, they would have. But the truth was that none of them had done it, and for once they were too afraid to lie about it.

“It was probably just another big spider,” Sue offers. It’s a little too shaky. Cindy knows what she felt, and it wasn’t heavy hairy legs, it was  _ fingers,  _ gripped too tightly around her skin. Reminding her of awful things. But she’ll take it. “I’ve seen tons of them in here. I guess they’re not really scared of people at all.”

“Sue, you say that like it’s more comforting,” Cisco tries to joke. His voice cracks part of the way through and he lets Cindy hold his hand in the darkness as they stand up. “I honestly think I’d take a zombie or a ghost or whatever over a big spider any day of the week. I’m not even kidding, guys. Or at least I know which one I’d rather wake up to find in front of my face, and it isn’t the one with eight legs.”

They continue on, Iris glancing back over her shoulder at the cameras perhaps a little more than she should. If something in the darkness really did grab Cindy’s wrist, then hopefully one of the cameras picked it up. And if it really was ‘just’ a big spider, hopefully the cameras would see that, too. Maybe it would put Cindy’s mind at ease. Iris hasn’t seen her close to that shaken up since the day her mom was finally arrested the year before. At least compared to that this is practically nothing.

“Come on,” Iris says quietly. It’s just a little too eerie in the darkness, but she doesn’t dare raise her voice any louder. The air smells strange, like there’s something rotting nearby. Iris tries to rationalize it-just because people aren’t working here anymore doesn’t mean no animals have gotten in and died. “We’ve still got a lot more ground to cover. This building isn’t going to search itself.”

They stick together a little bit more closely now, Iris guiding Sue’s hand to the wall for just a little bit longer than she has to, Ralph letting Cisco lean on him for just a little bit too long, Cindy pretending she isn’t tightly curling her littlest finger around Cisco’s own. Even if most of them want to believe Sue’s perfectly reasonable explanation about it being a spider, they can’t. It feels too  _ convenient  _ to believe, almost.

“Reader’s not picking up anything,” Cindy says softly after about five minutes of almost dead silence outside of their footsteps, brushing her thumb over the tiny screen. “And as far as I know Cisco hasn’t seen even so much as a hint of spectral activity on any of the cameras so far.”

“We’ll check it all when we get back to my house,” Iris promises. They can all hear the tensity in her voice. STAR Labs is her white whale, and nobody really knows why. Including Iris herself. She just feels like this is something that she  _ needs  _ them to do. She’s been trying to get them to check this place out for months, and when they all finally agreed, she’d wasted no time jumping right into preparations and scheduling. “Let’s just keep moving.”

As if cued by Cindy’s announcement, the recorder started to  _ scream,  _ long and loud and shrill without stopping. Ralph automatically clamps his hands over Sue’s ears, and Cisco leaps away from Cindy with a little hiss, inaudible over the din. Cindy smacks the side of the little device a few times, shaking it and squinting at the screen. “Christ, Iris, I-”

That’s when they all hear the  _ other  _ scream. Low and loud and more like a howl than anything else. All five of them immediately spring together despite the sudden close proximity to the wailing EVP device, automatically grabbing for hands and sleeves and arms. They pretend not to feel Iris’s shaking. They pretend that they can’t smell how the air has suddenly soured, like something underneath them is molding.

Nobody dares to say anything, but Cisco keeps pointing the camera down the dark hallway ahead of him despite how he can feel his heartbeat pounding against his ribs. For a moment, the sound of the recorder cuts out, as does the distant howl,  _ just  _ for long enough that Sue can whisper “Do you think it was an echo?” before it starts up again-but this time, the sound comes from practically on top of them.

They don’t even have to ask if Iris is okay with them leaving before they turn around and sprint back the way that they came.

Iris takes heaving breaths as she dodges at the hands suddenly coming out of the walls, reaching for her face and arms. Their nails catch on her skin and leave long bloody scratches in their wakes. If she could think straight, she’d tried to snap a photo of them, or hit back, but all she can do is run and grip Sue and Cisco’s hands in her own. They hold onto each other to stay together, just like they always do when they leave, after that time they all got split up in a cemetery at midnight with nothing but their flashlights to guide them through the headstones.

Their footsteps echo deep into their bones, bouncing off the walls. It should be too loud to hear anything chasing behind them, but they can hear  _ another  _ set of footsteps overlaid on top of theirs, deep and strong and oh-so-menacing. They might be able to convince themselves it really  _ is  _ just another set of echo, if not for the spine-chilling screaming and hissing and humming getting ever closer. Cisco’s ragged breathing is loud in Iris’s ear, and Sue is holding her wrist tight enough to bruise.

As the round the corner and smash directly into a dead-end wall, Iris suddenly wishes that she had listened to Caitlin when she told her the day before that STAR Labs was way too dangerous to investigate.

But then, just as suddenly as the wall appears in front of them, it melts away into nothingness, a mist that swirls down from where the sides of the hallway should be and forms something almost  _ human  _ in shape-which is something that none of them can think about right now. Iris hesitates for just a little bit too long, and Cisco runs past her, pulling their little cluster forward out of-or perhaps deeper into-the laboratory.

Just as quickly and out of nowhere as last time the architecture changed, the hallway they’re running down suddenly veers right, forcing them to follow its path. Mentally, Cisco recites statistics on times when ghost activity was associated with disorientation, confusion, hallucinations. Things that might have caused them to forget the way that they came in. Things that might be making them see stuff that isn’t there. Hear things that aren’t real. Perhaps it’s just a gas leak-and then he trips, as one of the hands coming out of the walls springs from the floor instead and grabs onto his ankle.

As soon as Cisco goes sprawling, the rest of them stumble down with him as he drags them to the floor by accident. It’s the downside of running while holding hands; one of them is bound to fill in the role of dainty white girl in a horror movie, the one who trips and falls right when she’s about to escape the killer. Iris had just been expecting it to be Ralph, not Cisco, who brought them down by accident.

There’s no time to run. There’s nowhere they could even go. Cindy has her knife, but they’ve tested it, and it’s no good against ghosts. Salt and holy water is a myth at best, and an attracting agent at worst. There’s nothing. They’re defenseless. The final search of the CC High Paranormal Club. Cisco and Cindy aren’t even looking at each other, like they’re afraid doing that will make it real, Ralph’s hugging on to the rest of them like he’s trying to shield all of them with his weird skinny body, Sue’s smacking her flashlight against the wall like she’s trying to frighten the ghost away, and Iris… Iris starts praying.

She’s not sure if she believes in a capital-G God. Her mom was Jewish, but she never really knew her much, and her dad is Christian, even though she’s not really sure exactly what flavor. They don’t celebrate much other than Christmas and sometimes Easter, anyway. But there’s an afterlife. Her experience with ghosts has taught her that much. Iris has always been just a little bit more in tune with the things around her than almost everyone else she met- _ almost.  _ The rest of her club is the same way. They see things other people don’t. Feel things other people don’t.

Iris saw ghosts. Things in the air that shouldn’t have been there. Her mom always said that she was her little observer. Or at least, her dad said that, and when he did, her mom leaned over her shoulder and whispered, faintly, that he learned it from her, and that he was right when he said it. Iris noticed things. She was smart. Her mother’s little watcher.

Cindy and Cisco felt things.  _ Weird  _ things. They knew when earthquakes and storms were going to happen before they did, sometimes. Cindy could balance a knife on her tongue and down a guy three times her size, which helped, and Cisco knew tech and could tell from the second they arrived if the place they were at was really haunted.

Really, Iris had wanted Sue in the club, but where Sue went, Ralph went, two weirdo kids who couldn’t be more different from each other. Sue had a freakishly good memory, was a good driver, and she always seemed to have something of a layer of good luck around her. Ralph got to stay because he could steal them alcohol and snakes really liked him, which Iris thought was pretty sick.

And Caitlin, their missing member, had been ‘recruited’ because she had first aid training and could see in the dark like she was walking around in broad daylight. Plus, she didn’t really have any friends outside of her foster sister, Lily Stein, so Iris had decided to make friends with her regardless of if she wanted to be in the club or not.

Iris’s friends. People  _ worth  _ praying for. So Iris crosses her fingers and throws caution to the wind and practically begs for a guardian angel to show up and get them the  _ hell  _ out of there, even if was kind of rude to say that, because she didn’t have time to worry about being rude in a life-or-death situation like this one. They were out of time, options, places to run… It couldn’t have been more than two seconds since Cisco had first tripped. She just doesn’t know what else to do. But Iris is their leader. She’s  _ going  _ to get them all out of this.

Which is when the wailing cuts out.

The five of them hesitantly peek up, and Cisco can’t resist raising his still-recording camera ever-so slightly to catch the sight before them on film, preserved for everyone to see.

The beast that’s been chasing them-since that’s what the best word for it is-is  _ huge,  _ matted yellow fur and feathers covering its massive mangy shoulders as it hunches down, scythe-like claws scraping over the wearing away metal with a squealing sound. It has a rat tail that twitches and curls, human face staring directly at its new opponent with glowing red eyes.

The new ghost, on the other hand, looks like a mutilated corpse. Like the pictures Iris saw of the victims of the horrific STAR Labs murders when she was doing her research, the ones that she couldn’t look at for more than a few seconds. Honestly, because of that, it’s just as horrifying as the monster chasing them, exposed bone and oozing crevices shining with a light that comes from nowhere. It’s small, though. Child small.

Iris doesn’t stop looking back, even as Cindy yanks her to her feet, even as she’s pulled along with the rest of them. Only when they vanish around the corner does she finally stop craning her neck over her shoulder and look ahead, picking up the pace and following the now handless corridors back to where they came. The path suddenly seems so simple now. The lab suddenly feels more secure. More rooted in their realm. It’s fascinating.

It’s raining when they get outside and scale the fence, not even bothering to look for the hole in the darkness. They collapse against Cisco’s car in dead silence, not even caring that they’re getting soaked through to the bone, looking back at STAR Labs as it hums and seems to glow in the inky blackness.

Iris doesn’t listen to them climbing into Cisco’s car and searching through pictures, seeing the ones of the red-eyed yellow monster (she does, however, hear Cisco call it a demon in full sincerity, and  _ that  _ is something she can absolutely agree with) lunging out of one of the holes and clamping its claws around Cindy’s wrist. She doesn’t listen to Sue say that she thought she saw something watching them from one of the rooms they had passed when they first went in, but had thought the red flash was just a raccoon’s eyeshine in a flashlight beam.

Iris just looks up at STAR Labs. Massive and not empty in the slightest. A small ghost with a mutilated body. A child who had been killed along with his parents inside STAR Labs, somehow without any of the staff noticing. The murderer never found, until tonight, when he-when  _ it  _ chased Iris and her friends through its collapsing lair. Until they were saved. A small ghost with a mutilated body.

“Thank you, Bartholomew Allen,” Iris whispers to the rain. “Thank you for saving us.”

Iris turns around and climbs into the passenger seat of the car. Cindy's sitting in the way back, knees brought all the way up to her chest. Ralph picks the music. Sue starts driving away, heading for Caitlin's house, flicking on her headlights once they're far enough away from STAR Labs. She looks out the window back at the building, and, just for a moment, so quickly she might've imagined it, Iris sees someone waving back at her.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm augustheart on tumblr.


End file.
